Kidnapped in Gaza

Prologue

The thought that we might get kidnapped didn't even occur to me until after I had scored our tickets for Tel Aviv. Having the flights in hand had set my mind reeling and convinced me that my big brother was finally coming to visit me in the Middle East. Considering he hasn't had a passport for thirty-five years and hasn't been out of the country in forty, out of everyone in the Jackson clan I had put Drew at the bottom of the list for potential visitors.

During the last fifteen years in which I've lived in Egypt, the Sultanate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), not one person from the fam, not even my dad or step mom, both world travelers with a taste for adventure (albeit erring on the side of luxury), have ever come to see me – not even to attend my Islamic wedding in Muscat nor to console me during my nine months of exile in the desert oasis of Ibri on the Arabian Peninsula, but those are other stories.

Like my folks, I had had the means and ways to drop in on someone I had come to care about but didn't. When I was in Bethlehem for Christmas, I didn't even try to rendezvous with Dima, my online Arabic Tutor for the past four years because of the complicated visa procedures required for entering the Gaza Strip where she lives with her family.

As war torn Gaza City was only going to be 71.1 km away from where we'd land in sunny Tel Aviv (but worlds apart in every other aspect) to not even attempt to visit her again would have been an eib, a shame in Arabic. With the volatile situation on the Gaza Strip, I might not ever get another chance and besides, after glitzy Dubai, I reckoned my brother, a hunter/militia type, would be up for something a little grittier, a little more authentic, on his first trip to the Middle East.

When I pitched the idea to him of posing as a journalist/cameraman team to finagle our way into Gaza, I was sure to mention the monthly air strikes, the presence of Hamas, Fatah, the Army of Islam and the Islamic State in the Levant. For a normal person, these would have been deal breakers but my brother couldn't have been more fired up about it. That should have been the first warning sign but to be honest I was just as excited as he was.

As a couple of South Texas boys growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, when hurricane season would arrive, the threat of real and present danger fired our imagination. We'd often picture ourselves as heroes in the face of mother nature's fury inspired by a slew of 70's and 80's disaster movies.

Aside from the odd earthquake out of Iran, a Mousad assassination squad from Israel or the odd Houthi cyber attack from Yemen, not much happens in the sleepy little oasis town of Al Ain where I live in the Emirates, ilhumdelelah, thanks be to God.

Thanks to the marital strife at home, my brother and I would often escape from our parents' shouting arguments though make believe. Aside from imagining ourselves as heroes facing insurmountable odds against natural and man made disasters, (doomsday prepping for the arrival of the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a perennial favorite when we lived on the Laguna Madre), we'd often daydream about forming our own detective agency. Like the brothers from our fave TV show at the time, Simon & Simon, we'd be Jackson & Jackson and have weekly adventures wrapped up neatly in an hour, just like they did.

In my bowl cut, tube socks and t-shirt with my name printed on the front of it in bold, squishy font, I imagined myself to be like A.J. Simon, suave & debonair (if only I had been precocious enough to know what that meant!). While my brother, with the roach clip in his feathered hair and his corduroy OP shorts, was like Rick Simon, a little wild & crazy but the guy to count on in a pinch.

It'd be a cinch, I figured, with my years of experience in the Arab world and my brother's real life background in private security (not to mention his fresh paramilitary training in Montana with ex-Navy Seals) to make the childhood daydream a reality in a way - kind of like when we'd go 'sploring around our neighborhood on Padre Island as kids on our banana seat bicycles, tassels fluttering in the salty breeze, but on a whole new international level.

All childhood daydreaming aside, the premise for our trip didn't really require that much imagination or even a willful suspension of belief; it was fairly plausible, actually.

Being a freelance journalist for Lonely Planet and the Matador Network since my sojourn in the Middle East first began (a side hustle from my regular day gig as an ESL cowboy), there was actually a chance of convincing the Israeli and Palestinian authorities that our motives were legit.

Ostensibly, the purpose of our visit to Gaza was to create a moving portrait piece about my Arabic teacher Dima - a young woman who represented the new generation of a life under siege in the Occupied Territories of Palestine who had found some degree of freedom and escape, as many do these days, online.